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'Dead State' Interview: Why There Are Too Many Zombies, And How To Fund Making More

Brian Mitsoda, founder and CEO of DoubleBear Productions, who are closing a round of Kickstarter funding for their first game, Dead State, is something of a notable figure, at least among fans of quality writing in games, and specifically of intelligent, well-constructed role-playing game words and worlds.

DoubleBear Productions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, much of his work has been kept from artistic or financial success for technical or financial reasons. Sometimes this was by technical issues not of his making: Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines was so legendarily bugged at launch due to budget shortages that it was almost unplayable in places, and yet had such a strong core that, nearly a decade after its launch, a fan community is still patching and upgrading it.

Other projects were cancelled – he was on the team whose Fallout game, codenamed “New Jersey”, was killed when Zenimax Media bought the license from cash-strapped Interplay and gave it to their Bethesda Softworks studio to create a 3D action-RPG game sharing an engine with their Elder Scrolls franchise. He mapped out the dialogue system for Alpha Protocol, the “espionage RPG” created by his former employers Obsidian, and wrote an early story draft which did not make it into the final product.

Bloodlines and Alpha Protocol are both worth playing, if not necessarily for fun – primarily if one is interested in how games are made to work – the fact that neither actually does in many places makes them fascinating studies, if often frustrating experiences. I have written about them here.

You’re never alone with two bears

With this in mind, it is understandable that he wanted to break out and set up for himself – to create a game that only he could cancel, and only he could decide was ready to ship. Hence DoubleBear Productions – so named, I understand, because the only thing cooler than a bear is two conjoined bears. DoubleBear was formed in 2009 and staffed by Mitsoda and his wife Annie Vandemeer Mitsoda, herself another veteran of the abortive Project New Jersey, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Alpha Protocol, with her own big studio battle scars. As Mitsoda explained by email:

We like having control of our own IP and production of our game and not having to worry about constantly presenting to and pleasing layers of management – this takes a ton of time away from actual production.

We’ve also both had years of work thrown out when projects get cancelled for the publisher’s financial reasons or a management priority shift – that’s years of work that no will ever see. We also wanted to be able to benefit from our product for as long as it is profitable – publishers rarely pay royalties anymore and while we both have products out there that are still selling, we don’t see a dime from them.

Additionally, being independent gives us the freedom to make games that we are passionate about and that would be impossible to get a publisher to fund, such as a turn-based survival RPG.

Old school: Dead State's RPG character sheet

That’s Dead State, a turn-based survival RPG, in the vein of Fallout, but set in the ruins of North America after a zombie apocalypse. The Falling-out Dead. Dawn of the Fallout. Night of the Turn-based Dead.

I love the Romero films mostly because they aren’t about the zombies. The Romero films concentrate on the social and political breakdown that something like the dead coming back to life would cause. They show just how easy it would be to slip from civilized society into desperate tribes of survivors. There really aren’t many other zombie films that concentrate on that.

A zombie game which focuses on what actually makes zombie films interesting – human interactions in extremity – would be an impressive prospect. Chainsawing through zombies is also fun, of course. But there are quieter virtues. Mitsoda has seen the zombie market explode since he founded DoubleBear, and not in a good way (that is, the way a zombie explodes if you shoot it with a shotgun at point blank range):

There are too many zombie games out there, period. And I don’t mean that in an “afraid of the competition” way, but in a “just stop it” way. There are zombies slapped in just about everything now – zombie shooters, zombie pajamas, zombie toilet cleaners – and it’s getting to the point that people just zone out when anything vaguely zombie is mentioned, especially games.

Which makes it kind of difficult to sell a game that’s trying to get back to the roots of the zombie genre – the human aspect.

This is the selling point of Dead State: it is not set during the first desperate struggle to survive, but in the long, dull period when zombies have become a fact of life (or unlife). If you make too much noise, or fail to pay attention, or let them gather, they might be a problem. But the real challenges are resource scarcity, morale, starvation… and other people, who might have their own very different ideas about your role in the post-apocalyptic food chain.

Dead State’s trailer

Dead State, in common with other game ideas recently mooted by luminaries of the golden age of PC RPGs, set up a Kickstarter to fund its development. However, unusually, the Kickstarter began late in the development process – they were seeking funds not to begin the project, but to end it. Mitsoda again:

We did debate going onto Kickstarter much earlier in the process, but we thought that if we’re going to be asking for money, we should show our work. It’s extremely easy to promise that a game is going to be the best thing ever when there’s no actual game, but fans should be able to get an idea of what they’re backing. That was critically important to us.

I think – for developers – we’ve always wanted something like Kickstarter to be there to help fund games that aren’t going to be easy to sell to publishers. It’s amazing, and I really hope people don’t get burned out on it because you, the gaming public, are getting exactly the games you want when you fund games on a service like Kickstarter. I think indie gaming has made people more accepting of small projects with gameplay over graphics, and so the audience has expanded to the point where there is a large market for all kinds of smaller projects.

The Kickstarter is now fully funded, but with a little over a week to go number of stretch targets have been identified, and fundraising continues.

A note from the author: maintaining critical distance is often a challenge when one writes about things one loves. Generally, I think my critical distance is pretty good. However, a turn-based RPG set in a zombie apocalypse with dialogue and characterization from members of the Obsidian team, and specifically the lead writer of Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, a game so well-written that I have played it through from beginning to end at least twelve times to explore the script variations in what is structurally a very linear game? I think I might not be totally objective.

This does not guarantee a great game, of course: I am still nursing the wounds from Fort Zombie, which had elements in common, although not the same pedigree. And how a game actually plays is an issue, regardless of how good its story and characterization. But Dead State is without a doubt one of my most anticipated games.

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